1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to biofeedback tutor toys, and particularly relates to an adaptive biofeedback speech tutor toy providing programmed prompting; converting to usable form the human response of the user; immediately measuring the quality of the human response with respect to a standard; and selectively providing immediate triumphant celebration biofeedback plus a subsequent prompt--or corrective biofeedback.
2. Description of Related Art
Small children, learning a new language from zero level, mimic the speech of siblings and parents and are immediately provided with biofeedback in the form of hugs and verbal praise in celebration of the verbal triumph, continuing as a game when the response is good--and providing corrective repetition when improvement is appropriate. At least for children, this game type of biofeedback language tutoring is very effective, and usually is delightful fun for child and parent.
The sequence of prompt, mimic, evaluate and praise works well when the mimicry is good. Alternatively, the sequence of prompt, mimic, evaluate and re-prompt, often with emphasis at the point of error, re-mimic, evaluate and praise also works well. This immediate biofeedback is an effective and comfortable mechanism for improving virtually all aspects of speech. Such aspects of speech include dialect-related matters such as word sequence, vocabulary, diction, grammar and pronunciation. Each of these dialect-related matters has its own nuances, such as geographical or cultural accent. Some matters are detectable in the written language; others are detectable only in speech. Especially in the case of pronunciation, differences of tempo, stress, intonation and emphasis may be related to gender, age, education, body characteristics including vocal cord vibration frequency, and other factors. The usual desire, however, is to be able to communicate with a listener in a manner which is both effective and pleasing.
Persons who are not native speakers of the local language often communicate very effectively and in a very pleasing manner and still wish to eliminate their accents. Certain local language sounds may be alien to the native language and thus be very hard to hear and very, very difficult to speak. Other characteristics of language, such as the use of plurals, may require careful study.
The loving parent, educated and proficient in the local language, is perhaps the best tutor, particularly for a child, who is perhaps the best language student. The dedicated and expert tutor may be next best. When this sort of language education is not available, an educational toy may become a substitute with great hope for success. The toy, if not loving, is at least patient--and in most cases is great fun.
There are, however, a number of problems in computerized language training. Spelling, even grammar, have been computerized with great success, at least insofar as checking for correctness is concerned. Speech is another matter. There are a number of problems in computerizing speech training. A human language tutor, for example, may seemingly automatically set thresholds of acceptance of ambient noise, error level acceptance, and lesson direction. The human tutor, for example, may prompt the word "flower", hear the response, and re-prompt with the same word with altered stress, tempo and other parameters to sound like "fff-lower." This may use a vast amount of calculation and network analysis in the tutor's brain, without any perceived effort on the part of the tutor. The human tutor is very adept at close match relativity; programming a toy to respond to a synchronous presentation of several close matches is difficult, even if the toy contains a microprocessor.
There is also the matter of transducing vocal prompts and responses into data for processing, storage and retrieval.
Adult students of language, particularly those adults already fluent in a native language, also require a great deal of feedback, but unavailability of siblings and parents and embarrassment make biofeedback in the form of hugs and verbal praise more difficult to achieve.
Nevertheless, a long-standing need has been apparent for some time, for an educational toy learning system for speech.